A Wicked Snow (22 page)

It was easy to get the assignment. Jeff Bauer had lived in Anchorage for five years when he worked the stolen Russian antiquities sting. He'd even been to Kodiak Island to fish with his teenage nephews one summer when his sister sent the boys up from Idaho. The idea that it was possible that Claire Logan had been right under his nose was more annoying than infuriating. Bauer wasn't completely sure that Wheaton was telling the truth or making a play for some attention before he was measured for a piano crate and converted into a worm smorgasbord. The supervising agent in Portland knew Bauer's history with LOMURS, as the case was still known in FBI-speak, and made it easy to procure a plane ticket and a hotel reservation in his name.

"Talk about a feather in your cap," the agent told him. "You nail that bitch and it would be right up there with bringing in D. B. Cooper."

There was some truth to the remark. Cooper was the man who "skyjacked" a Northwest Airlines 727 in November 1971. With parachutes strapped on, Cooper jumped out of the plane at an altitude of 10,000 feet with $200,000 and was never heard from again. Some said he died. Others insisted he made his way to Margaritaville and was working on his tan. Though far less gruesome than Claire Logan, Cooper was in a weird way a male equivalent. Infamous and notorious, he had captured the public's imagination. A tavern hosted annual parties; there were many books and even a movie. Cooper was never found, which, like Logan, had kept alive the possibility that he'd gotten away with the crime.

Bauer caught the five-hour flight from Portland to Anchorage and a commuter flight to Kodiak, 250 miles south of Alaska's largest, and some alleged only "real" city. Although it was 10 p.m., it was still light out an hour later when he landed at the town with the same name as the island.

As pretty as it was with its gorgeous and grand expanses of green forests, meadows, and a navigator's nightmare of a craggy coastline, Kodiak had seen its share of hard times. Pretty, of course, doesn't account for much when money is hard to come by. Sagging motel rates were only one indicator that the island hadn't fully rebounded from the last downturn. There was work, but not enough workers for the kind of positions offered. Cannery jobs were advertised in every edition of the Kodiak paper. Times had changed. The scrappy folks who drank most of their days away before sobering up for the cash that came with a good Tanner crab or shrimp season were in dwindling supply. The money didn't flow as it once did. Even a decade before, a man could make as much dough in three months with shares from a decent salmon run as he could with a yearlong stint working a decent-paying job on the mainland.

Bauer picked up a rental car, loaded it with his luggage and fishing gear, and checked into a room at the Northern Lights Best Western Motor Inn. As a courtesy, he drove over to the Kodiak sheriff's office to say hello to the sheriff, Kim Stanton. An Aleut, Stanton was thirty-eight with almond eyes and the thickest, darkest hair imaginable. He'd been elected to the post twice and was considered one of the most competent public officials on the island. Bauer did not say
whom
he was there to find, nor did the pudgy officer on duty inquire. Bauer knew the drill--a kind of don't-volunteer-information protocol. Over the years, Bauer had learned much about local and federal law enforcement and how the two factions seldom forged a viable working relationship. Territory, he knew, mattered; getting something right wasn't as important, it seemed, as
who
got it.

"You know," the officer said, "we spend half our budget taking people back to the mainland for extradition to God-knows-where they came from. People think Alaska is the last good place to hide. Like we don't bother to catch them because we're too busy dog sledding or snowmobiling."

"Or ice fishing," Bauer said, continuing the joke. He looked out the window at the dusky and nearly deserted street outside. A car slowly passed, then sped up, its tail-lights glowed red. "I'll let you go so you can skin a grizzly." He winked. "Be back when Sheriff Stanton's in. Thanks, deputy."

Letting the door swing closed behind him, Bauer walked across the street and ordered a BLT and fries to go from the coffee shop and returned to his room at the Northern Lights. It was 10:40 p.m. He had one more call to make, but given the hour he decided to put it off until the morning.
Maybe the afternoon. Just later,
he thought. He watched the tail end of the Anchorage news, though he paid little attention to what was being reported. His mind was fully occupied with Claire Logan.
Was she here?
Her Social Security number had long since been abandoned. After Leanna Schumacher died, surveillance was discontinued on her place in Misery Bay. Bauer never told Hannah about the wiretapping on the Schumachers' phone line in the event that Claire contacted her younger sister. It was never that the Feds didn't trust the Schumachers; they just had no other idea about whom Claire might call. The wiretaps were an insurance policy. But, of course, Claire never did call. They were discontinued several years after the murders, but the court order was always in place just in case.

And so Claire Logan remained a phantom. The only known photos of her were from her Bellingham High School yearbook. Sitting on the bed of his Kodiak motel room, Bauer studied the scan of Claire Berrenger's senior picture. Admittedly, it was black-and-white and that could account for some of his reaction. But, he thought, the woman looked so cold. In the photograph her eyes looked black--there was no differentiation between her pupils and her iris. Just two small puddles of blackness. He'd seen the photograph a million times before. An FBI artist had created a fast-forwarded image of what Claire Logan might look like in her sixties. Bauer didn't think much of the effort.

"She's not going to let nature take its course," he told his supervisor back in Portland before he left. "First of all, she has the money to have whatever she wants done as she got older. Secondly, she knows the whole fucking world knows her mug."

"Could be," the agent said.

"I know this woman," Bauer said. "She's a total control freak. She's been pinched and pulled tighter than a soap opera actress."

It was almost 11 p.m. when Bauer dialed Hannah's number at home. It was Ethan Griffin who answered. His voice was a little rough, a little sleepy sounding.

"Sorry this is so late," Bauer said, realizing the time difference between Alaska and the lower forty-eight. He identified himself and asked for Hannah. "It's about her mother."

"I hope my mother-in-law is dead," Ethan said.

"
Every
guy wishes that a time or two," Bauer said. But the joke fell flat.

"Right. It would be better off for everyone. Hannah and Amber, especially. Amber doesn't know anything about her grandmother, and I'd like to keep it that way."

"I'd probably feel the same way," Bauer said, "if she was my little girl."

"Trust me. You would," Ethan said.

"It's bound to come out. Hope you're prepared."

"Thanks for the advice," Ethan said. "But if you guys hadn't screwed up when this all went down in Rock Point, we wouldn't be talking about it now. Am I correct?"

"We did the best we could. You know that the law isn't perfect."

"Right," Ethan was annoyed. He was the law. He thought he could have done better if he'd have been handed such a case. "Nice talking with you. Here's Hannah."

She stared into her husband's eyes and took the phone. "You've already found her?" she asked Bauer, sounding slightly panicked.

"Not so fast. I just got here. I just wanted to let you know that it might take a while. Go about your business. I'll keep you in the loop, but it has to be unofficial. You understand?"

"Yes," she lied. How could she not be involved? If anyone in the world deserved to be "in the loop" it was she. She had waited a lifetime for the moment to arrive where everything she'd have ever wanted to know would spurt forth like a geyser. She hated Claire Logan the infamous murderess. But she loved her mother--or at least the good parts of her she could still remember.

"If you find her, there will be no hiding it from anyone, you know," Hannah said. "People--if you can call Marcella Hoffman that--are already sniffing around."

"I know. If we find her, it'll blow bigger than Mount St. Helens did in 1980," Bauer said before giving Hannah the phone number of the Northern Lights.

"Take care of yourself," he said.

"You, too," Hannah replied, laying the phone silently in its cradle.

Ethan was undressed and in bed, holding the covers open for his wife. Hannah refused his gesture and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

"That means you want to talk about it?" he asked.

Hannah looked at her husband. "I think I should tell Amber something," she said.

Ethan sat upright. "No," he said. "
We
agreed. She doesn't need to know anything about this. I don't want her living with this. It'll drive her crazy."

"I've lived with it," she muttered. "And I'm all right."

"Are you? I mean, Hannah, look at you." He held her by her shoulders, not really to shake her, but to snap her into some kind of awareness. "You haven't slept in days. You've lost weight. ...You aren't the same person you were when you thought..." he stopped himself.

"
Thought
what?"

"Thought... she was probably dead."

"
Hoped
. I had
hoped
all these years that she was dead. And you need to know, I'm still hoping. But I've got Jeff Bauer, Marcus Wheaton, and that cretin Marcella Hoffman reminding me that Claire Logan lives. In one way or another. She lives. My mother won't die. Like Sissy Spacek's hand out of the grave grabbing at us all at the end of
Carrie
. My mother still lives."

She was crying now.

He tried to comfort her, but she seemed resistant to his touch. "You need to rest," he told her.

"No," she said. "I mean, yes, rest would help. But I can't sleep, because I keep thinking of her."

Ethan pulled her into bed and turned off the light. He held Hannah and felt ripples of grief pass through her body. She was a wreck.

"I love you, baby," he said.

"Love you."

In a half hour Ethan allowed himself to drift off. Hannah's eyes were wide open, staring at the clock as the digital numbers rolled from 2 to 3, then on to 4 a.m. Each hour now meant something. Each hour, each tumble of the lighted drums emblazoned with boldface numbers, meant Hannah Logan Griffin was that much closer to resolution. Closer to truth. She tossed and turned for another hour, battering her pillow and twisting the coverlet. Strangely, when she finally fell asleep that night, it was moonflowers she thought about. The creamy white, swirling blossoms, twisted open in the magic of an early evening. She and her mother sat on the log and watched while her brothers played inside the big yellow house. In her sleep, Hannah smiled.

It would take some time. Computers could only do so much. In the decades-old case of Claire Logan, computers were useful only for eliminating potential suspects. All Bauer knew--and that was if Wheaton was telling the truth--was that Logan ran a fishing resort on Kodiak Island in Alaska. There were no Logans listed, of course. But there were dozens of resorts of the type that Marcus Wheaton had described.

"Close enough to whatever roads they have up there, because she didn't want to bother with seaplanes bringing guests in," Wheaton had said, huffing and puffing in the penitentiary's visiting cell. "She researched it. She did. Nice enough place that she'd be comfortable. Room for a dozen fishermen at any given time, because she wanted to make money."

The last remark almost brought a grin to Bauer's handsome face. Characteristic restraint, however, kept him from saying anything snide. But how did she plan on making her income? Fishing fees or murdering her guests?

Out of what turned out to be a hundred and fifty names, two-thirds were discounted right away because their lodges, resorts, and gear shops had been in operation far longer than twenty years. A cross-check of Alaska game and fishing licenses indicated as much-- though Bauer knew that record keeping in Juneau, while improved since the advent of computers, wasn't the most reliable system.

That left around forty-five possible havens for Logan. Another series of checks indicated that about twenty of those could be discounted for reasons ranging from ethnicity and gender.

Claire Logan might be smart enough to make herself over,
Bauer thought,
but she can't change her gender or turn herself into an Inuit.

That left just twenty-five possibles, a more manageable but large number nonetheless. The FBI had gone through more possible Claire Logan expeditions than the higher-ups wanted to admit, so they'd send Bauer a backup only if an arrest appeared imminent. Bauer requested Bonnie Ingersol, the agent with whom he shared some of the first days of the investigation when they worked together in Portland in the late '70s. They had been quite close back then; even dated a few times, though nothing came of it. Neither one had the time for romance.

In the meantime, Bauer would have to pursue Claire Logan alone. He'd employ some old-fashioned nosing around, hopefully asking the right questions, as he trimmed the fat from the list. After four hours of phone calls, only one name remained on the list:
Louise Wallace
.

Louise Wallace lived in one of the prettiest houses on the island. It was a Victorian more suited to New England than Alaska, with twin turrets and a widow's walk that crossed the entire front side. Louise called it the front of the house, because it faced the choppy waters of Port Lion. The back side, as she termed it, faced the gravel road that ran up past the fishing cabins to the parking area adjacent to an enormous gazebo and fenced vegetable garden. The three-story house was painted seven colors, though the dominant hue was a creamy yellow that Louise called "shortbread." The main floor was an open plan with gorgeous wood floors and a two-story river-rock fireplace, the only concession Louise made to her late husband's desire for an Alaskan-style abode of rock, antlers, and peeled timbers. The furnishings were quite lovely. The majority were antiques the Wallaces had gathered throughout Alaska, though mostly from a trusted dealer on the outskirts of Anchorage.

An oak box lined with slippers of varying sizes sat next to the door and admonished visitors to take off their shoes before coming inside.
WE WOOD APPRECIATE IT
, read a little hand-lettered index card affixed to the box. The O's had been embellished into happy faces.

Bauer pulled his rental car to a shady spot near a rustic gazebo framed with silvery driftwood logs, choked with trumpet vines. The setting was gorgeous. Alaska's short growing season was short only in the number of days. In reality, the season was longer than points much further south, like Seattle or Portland. Eighteen hours of sunlight a day gave plants an extraordinary boost. Years ago, Bauer had been to the state fair in Palmer, not far from Anchorage, where "monster" vegetables vie for attention in one of the more popular gee-whiz exhibits. Three-foot zucchinis and cabbages with the astonishing girth of beach balls draw tourists from across the state to gawk in amazement. Bauer noticed that someone had been working in the Wallace garden that day. Sprinklers had been set to water the fluffy rows of vegetables and flowers that included everything from larkspur to delphinium to foxglove.

He heard sandpipers and gulls squawk from the surf below the house. The bell of a distant buoy clanged.

"Mrs. Wallace?" he called out as he knocked on the open door. No one responded. He called again and studied the splendor of leaded glass windows with maritime images inset into several panes.

"Yes? Can I help you?" The sweet face of an old woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall, somewhat thin, and had ashy blond hair streaked with gray. Gold-framed glasses didn't hide the fact that her blue eyes were the color of the cornflowers that stood high in the back of her garden border. Her lipstick was dark, a winy red that looked almost brown.

"Louise Wallace?" Bauer asked.

"Do I know you?" she said, brushing a wisp of silvery hair from her eyes. "Been out in the yard all morning. Must look like a fright."

"No ma'am. You don't know me. But I know you."

"You do? That's surprising to me, because I'm pretty good with faces. Names, not so much, but faces I never forget."

"We've never actually met," he said. "I know everything about you. I know your name is Claire Berrenger Logan and, more importantly, I know what you did in Spruce County twenty years ago."

It was a bluff and Bauer felt relief that he'd pulled it off, because he really wasn't that sure. She could be Claire Logan, but she didn't look exactly like the computer-aged model photo. Her chin was more angular, her nose a bit more pointed. He kept his face from betraying any emotion, though his chest pounded beneath his jacket. This was the bluff. The
big
bluff. The assumptive interview. If you tell the suspect you know they did something or are someone, you just might get lucky. Attitude, he knew, was everything.

"I'm sorry," Wallace said, peering over her glasses. "You must have me confused with someone else. My name is Louise.
Louise Wallace
. I don't know anyone by the name of Claire Morgan. Who are you?"

Nice touch,
Bauer thought,
getting the name wrong.

"Jeff Bauer, FBI," he said, presenting his I.D. badge and photo.

She took it and regarded it, then handed it back. "Oh my," she said. "I've never seen one of those in person. Very official and kind of pretty isn't it?" She didn't wait for a response. "I'm going to move the water again. Wish I had installed that drip system my husband had wanted. Would have saved me hours and hours of time. 'Course, lots of time in Alaska, anyway. Want some rhubarb?"

"No, thanks," Bauer said. "How long have you lived here?"

"Is this part of your official interview?" she asked with a wry smile.

He ignored her. "How long?"

"All right," she said. "I'll answer a few of your questions. I'll give you enough rhubarb for two pies. But you, Mr. Bauer, is it?"

He nodded, but said nothing.

"You will have to tell me who this Claire Morgan is and why you think I might know something about her. Is she in some kind of trouble?"

"I'd say so. Claire Logan murdered twenty people. Surely you've heard of her."

"Can't say that I have. We never got a satellite dish up here. My husband wanted one, but I kept saying no."

"The murders were discovered in Rock Point, Oregon. She killed nearly a score of lovelorn military men, plus her own two sons."

Holding a kitchen paring knife, Mrs. Wallace bent down and started cutting bright red stalks of rhubarb and arranging them in neat rows in the bottom of an antique vegetable basket.

"These will make a delicious pie," she said without looking up. "Does your wife bake?"

"No. Don't have a wife." Bauer felt a little foolish. This woman wasn't listening and she wasn't reacting to anything he had to say.

"As I was saying," he began again.

"As you were
accusing
," she said, still intent on her slicing. "Well, I've never had any children. And, I've never dated anyone from the military. I'm a Democrat."

"Mrs. Wallace," he said, stooping to face her directly. "Where were you living in the mid-70s?"

"This stalk is particularly suitable--thick and without all those nasty fibers."

Bauer was frustrated, and his tone couldn't conceal it. "Will you answer?"

Wallace stood up gripping the knife dripping, by then, with the red juice of rhubarb. Her eyes were cold, glacial blue.

"I don't talk about that part of my life," she said harshly, the first shift in a demeanor that Bauer could only have described as sweet and kindly. "Not to anyone."

"You'll need to answer to me," he fired back. "I've waited two decades to find out what rock you've crawled under and your grandma-of-the-year act is as transparent as ice."

She bent back down and resumed slicing. She remained expressionless. "You, young man, are mistaken. Now, do you want the rhubarb or not?"

"I saw Marcus Wheaton last week," Bauer said. He stared at her, but nothing came from her in the way of a genuine reaction. Not even a flutter. "Saw him with your daughter, Hannah."

For a half second, Bauer thought he noticed a slight, very slight hesitation in the woman's cutting of glossy red stalks. Perhaps it was merely his hope that he could find something in her manner, demeanor, and cadence of her speech--
anything
--that could suggest she was not being truthful.

"I don't have any children," she said. "I've never had any children, sons, daughters, or any combination thereof. Mr. Wallace and I would have liked children and I suppose the fact that I couldn't have any is my cross to bear. Satisfied? Furthermore, I don't know anybody named Wheaton. Your accusations are very, very upsetting to me. I'm sure you didn't mean for them to be, and truly I'm sorry I can't help. I live my life being helpful to others."

With that she reached for her basket, turned abruptly, and started for the house, abandoning Bauer by the garden gate. There was no point in calling out to her to stop because Bauer really didn't know what to make of her. Louise Wallace was one of two things, a sweet old lady or a cold-blooded killer. He aimed to find out just which she was.

A half hour later and back in his room at the Northern Lights, Bauer used a handkerchief to carefully remove his photo I.D. badge from its protective leather and plastic sheath before sliding it into a glassine. It wasn't evidence per se. But he was treating it as such. Louise Wallace had held it as they stood in her garden. She had touched it after Bauer had made sure it was perfectly clean. He had only held it on its edge. He phoned Bonnie Ingersol at the Portland office. She was out, so he left a message for her to sit tight until he called her back in about an hour. Bauer got back behind the wheel and drove to the Kodiak airport where he put the small package on a plane that would connect with an Alaska Airlines flight to Portland. With a layover in Anchorage, and a connection in Seattle, Ingersol could pick it up by six the next morning. Bauer looked at his Seiko. In a few hours, he'd know the truth. He scratched his head and smiled. A beer seemed like a good idea right then.